Art
Technology is changing how artists create and art enthusiasts engage with the work – The Globe and Mail
Vickie Vainionpää’s Gaze Paintings on display at Olga Korper Gallery. The artists used eye-movement tracking software to inspire the series.Courtesy Olga Korper Gallery
You can’t help but be caught up in the swirling tubular lines that tumble through Vickie Vainionpää’s paintings. Twisting forcefully yet gracefully, her gestures, often rendered in florid neon hues, feel at once fluidly organic and yet purpose driven. On closer inspection of the Montreal-based artist’s more recent oil on canvas works, the images of faces and bodies materialize from within the corkscrew-silhouetted translucent forms she masterfully articulates.
These glimpses of human presence reflect the painter’s source material for the pieces in her show Gaze Paintings, on until April 27 at Toronto’s Olga Korper Gallery. Here, Vainionpää reinterprets in a beguiling and modern way the male gaze cultivated by female nude-centric works by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens and Jacopo Tintoretto. The shapes she has painted have been informed by intel gathered through the use of eye movement-tracking hardware and generative 3D software, plus a plugin she wrote in collaboration with her partner, data scientist Harry Vallianos.
“I’ve always been a painter first, and I’ve always been interested in how to make a painting,” Vainionpää says about her practice. “We also live in a digitally saturated world, and I feel like it’s my duty to reflect the time that I’m living in and to use these tools in my process.”
Many creatives echo this idea, using digital tools to inform their art. Computer-crafted works are appearing in an increasing number of venues, from galleries to art fairs. Augmented reality experiences and virtual reality headsets have also become more common in art-centric spaces, such as at Shezad Dawood’s multidisciplinary exhibition on until May 5 at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. The show boasts an immersive virtual reality (VR) component that more than one visitor can interact with at a time, making art something viewers can actively participate in as well as engage with as a viewer.
Gaze Paintings poses the question: “What does it mean to look at a painting?” Most of the pieces represent Vainionpää’s own visual journey as she viewed some of history’s most vaunted works, with her eye movements being tracked and captured by hardware made by Pupil Labs. The company’s glasses, which Vainionpää added to her artistic toolkit in 2022, have forward-facing cameras that record different data points such as cicada amplitude (how much the eye moves back and forth), fixation points and fixation duration.
We Call Them The Sustainers, by multimedia artist Skawennati. She created animated videos on the interactive platform Second Life.Courtesy Ellephant
The data are then imported to a computer to create a variety of different visual forms that Vainionpää uses as inspiration to create the final work she crafts with oil paints. Vainionpää also used the optical actions of over 100 volunteers who answered her call out on Instagram for works The Painter’s Studio and The Dream; their data points were collected using a webcam eye-tracking platform.
“Taking that data as a starting point is like reflecting the painting back on itself and asking questions of it,” she says, adding that she discovered consistent areas of lingering across her subjects’ gaze so far. “There’s an effort to reveal some sort of hidden logic behind every painting, which I find fascinating.”
Two new additions to Vainionpää’s series, The Judgment of Paris (Excerpt I) and (Excerpt 2), were on view at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery booth during the recent Plural art fair in Montreal. Referencing Ruben’s work, these canvases are even more colourful and hypnotic in nature.
“Technology is something that supports her talent,” says Plural’s new general director, Anie Deslauriers, when asked about Vainionpää’s oeuvre in the context of digital art. “Artists will go from integrating parts of these technologies to support what they’re trying to say through to the other end of the spectrum where artists can create an entire world.”
At the fair, the gallery Ellephant’s booth, for example, showcased multimedia artist Skawennati’s Indigenous Futurism-focused work. She’s perhaps best known for her animated videos crafted on the interactive platform Second Life.
Deslauriers notes that integrating digitally presented art into personal, corporate and institutional collections has introduced new considerations in terms of archiving. “We have to keep researching and developing different methods of preserving these works,” she says. After all, as time wears on, a new media work will be considered just as vital to the canon as one of the pieces fixated on in a painting by Vainionpää.
“I think that as a painter, you assume that people are going to look back on your work and reference it,” she says, noting that one day she hopes to capture the experience of someone looking at a piece of art in a gallery or museum setting instead of through a webcam. “You hope that it means something to people in the future.”
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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